The present invention relates to method and apparatus for automatically recording a magnetic tape with randomly selected program units such as musical numbers. More particularly, the present invention enables a consumer to be provided with a customized tape recording which includes, for example, a group of program units arranged in an order preselected by the consumer from a bank of available program units. Some forms of the present invention will additionally provide a label for the tape recording which lists the units selected in order of recording.
The commercial recording industry, while it has been highly successful, has been plagued by a number of herefore unsolved limitations and drawbacks. For example, the musical tastes of consumers change very rapidly, which makes it very difficult for recording companies to decide accurately the type and quantity of entertainment material to provide. At the point of sale at the retail level, these limitations have resulted in insufficient availability of desired material and at the same time an overabundance of material which has not come into popular demand or which has become stale and may be sold, if at all, only well below cost.
Entertainment numbers are typically initially promoted and popularized by broadcasts and live performances. Usually the consumer shops for records with a specific selection in mind. While singles of the selection may be available in disc record form, they are usually not available in tape format. Also, many record albums contain only one or several songs which the consumer truly enjoys and wants, but which include other songs which the consumer does not wish to purchase but must. This monumental lack of choice in prerecorded long playing tapes has lead consumers to buy blank tape in substantial quantities and duplicate illegally vast quantities of copyrighted material from recordings or from broadcast transmissions. Such practices of creating custom tape recordings not only deprives artists and composers of the royalties to which they are entitled, it is a time consuming and laborious project for the consumer and one which has often produced less than satisfactory results.
Still this problem has not been solved by any new consumer appliances. A variety of multiple-cartridge playback units have appeared for consumer use in the marketplace. They have the same drawbacks and limitations as record players for LP records: that is, each tape is played through entirely before the next tape is up for play. Alternatively, juke boxes are equally unsuited for home and car uses. They are bulky and have to be loaded and reloaded with single disc recordings periodically. Moreover, once disc recordings are discarded, they are essentially wasted and have no practical salvage value or capability of being rerecorded with new program material.
Several systems have been proposed in the past for providing customized tape recordings. One example is found in U.S. Pat. No. 3,718,906 to Lightner. Therein a coin operated remote vending machine addressed a master tape system at a central location via a picture phone wide band telephone line (a system not widely installed in the United States or elsewhere). The master tape system played selected tape recorded programs back to the remote vending unit which thereupon transferred the programs onto a blank cartridge and delivered the custom cartridge to the consumer at the end of the recording operation. Such a system was highly impractical from many aspects. It required all playback to be at a central location, transmission to remote locations via wideband communications paths, and recording to be at each remote location. That system required unique, complex and expensive equipment, that could not easily be maintained without a fleet of mobile maintenance stations and technicians. Also, the Lightner system omitted entirely any provision for labelling the cartridges with a list of the selections recorded thereon in the order of recording. Without such a label, the customer had to come up with his own label or simply try to remember from time to time what his custom selections had been. Thus, those prior systems, such as the one shown in the Lightner patent, did not provide any practical answer to the consumer's desire for custom tape recordings.